


One day at a time

by ApocalypseThen



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: 50000 years into the future, F/M, Mass Effect Kink Meme, No Choice Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 17:05:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12325218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApocalypseThen/pseuds/ApocalypseThen
Summary: The far far future is a strange and lonely place for the last turian.





	One day at a time

"Esteemed Ancient Reanimated Operative Codenamed Archangel Garrus Vakarian," began the message, "we humbly request your latest report. Please relate the current status of your investigation into the whereabouts of The Shepard. We regret that failure to comply for a third time will result in withdrawal of financial support and other punitive consequences as detailed in subsection four, paragraphs three through two hundred seventeen of your contract."

Garrus hadn't read past paragraph nine and he was already feeling queasy. He shut off his terminal.

"Come to bed already," croaked an all-too-familiar voice from the tiny bunk at the back of the cabin.

"Damn you," Garrus breathed. He plotted a course and set the shuttle on autopilot. Then he hunched back in the pilot's chair and tried to get comfortable.

He never could. Even the cold sleep of stasis had been better than this. It wasn't the chair itself so much as the fact that she was always watching. Eventually he drifted off into a half-lucid dream.

He also hated how chipper she was in the mornings. "Careful now," she admonished. "You wouldn't want to go and disturb some ancient Asari artifact that gives you cryptic visions about the impending apocalypse, would you?"

Garrus grit his teeth and ignored her. He'd tried engaging. He'd tried trusting her, and bore the scars. He'd tried everything short of spacing her. He just didn't know how to reach her.

He'd also tried self-pity, but that didn't suit him very much. The clone's silent satisfaction at his depressive turn had been worse than anything. At least when she was trying to manipulate him, he knew he had the upper hand.

He only hadn't killed her because... he didn't know why. His hands had been shaking as he opened the stasis pod. What was it? His twentieth? Thirtieth? He'd lost count of all the silent little pods he'd opened, only to find a dessicated corpse, long dead from a stasis malfunction, or just another time capsule. And when he'd realised, almost instantly, that it wasn't her, how he'd turned in on himself. The next he could remember, he was in the chair, and she was sleeping in the bunk.

There was a pattern, if you knew the code. Where to find the pods, at least, if not what was in them. He hadn't shared it with his venerable hosts, the strange beasts that the Yahg had evolved into.

Little dog-sized creatures with huge heads full of pointy teeth, pacifist, vegetarian but aggressively post-capitalist, they assured him that the Reapers would succumb to their superior economic theory.

Garrus had his doubts but he kept them to himself. They had elevated Shepard to some kind of deity, though. Garrus... wasn't quite on board with that either. He'd taken their money, though, signed their interminable contract without reading it. It got him a shuttle and it got him away from their weird society.

The Yahg didn't conquer other species or wage war, not any more. If they encountered a new species, sentient or otherwise, they just eliminated it with whatever technology was the most effective. They were a monoculture, laughably arrogant and ridiculously vulnerable... how could they not see that?

It wasn't worth thinking about. Just another reason not to kill her. At least he wasn't alone. Although he had no doubt the clone would milk the Yahg for everything she could, given the chance. She'd be Queen of the galaxy in no time at all. So he couldn't just let her go, either.

Instead he had her chained to the bunk like an animal. He lived in the chair, now.

He'd done the math. There had been tens of thousands of the pods. Most of them would have been time capsules. A lucky few were frozen to wait out the cycle. A fraction of them had been found and destroyed by the Reapers even as the survivors had been seeding the galaxy with them.

It was just that he didn't know which one Shepard had ended up in. So this was his new life, hopping from system to system, hunting down the pods and occasionally firing off a report to his Yahg backers.

If all the pods had survived, he'd need several lifetimes to check them all. The Yahg said they'd fix that for him, if it became necessary.

He hadn't filed a report since he found the clone, though. What were the chances? Of all the stasis pods in all the galaxy... Something in him resisted the temptation of passing her off and then vanishing to carry on his search. But he didn't have the mental energy left over to string them along.

Another time capsule.

"Suppose I tell you where she is," said the clone.

Garrus ignored her. Everything about her was a lie.

The clone sang a set of coordinates. "You don't even have to trust me. Just take a look."

Garrus wouldn't even have consulted the star charts if there wasn't something familiar about those digits.

They fit the formula he had in his head. There was probably something there.

"How would you know?" he asked.

"Who do you think put me in that pod?" the clone shot back.

"Bullshit," Garrus replied. "You hacked the system. Faked your way in. Pretended to be her. She wouldn't have violated the protocol."

"Whatever," the clone said, lying back down. "Come to bed."

Another time capsule. Another burned out shell. A rotted corpse.

"All right, damn it." Garrus set the autopilot.

The clone maintained a wise silence until they were almost on top of it. "Fuck, I really hope she's there," she said, finally.

Behind the glass, the radiation damage freckling it with impurities, there she lay. His.

"Who's this guy?" were her first words, addressed to the clone.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Garrus said, resigned. He pulled out his pistol and held it loosely by his side.

The clones watched him carefully.


End file.
